Whispered Dark - Chapter 3: Wrong

"Kate, dinner's ready."

Chelsea waited for a response that didn't come. The door to Kate's room remained closed, its surface smooth and blank and somehow accusatory. Through it, she could hear nothing—no movement, no acknowledgment, nothing. Just the soft hum of the station's ventilation system and the distant clang of maintenance somewhere deeper in the structure.

This was new. Kate had always answered. Even on her worst days, even after the hardest incursions, even when she was so exhausted she could barely lift her head, she'd always responded when Chelsea called. A "coming" or an "okay" or even just a grunt of acknowledgment.

"Kate?" Chelsea's hand hovered over the door panel. "Are you okay?"

Silence.

Chelsea overrode the lock.

Kate sat on the floor in the corner of her room. Her back was pressed against the wall, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped tight around them like she was trying to hold herself together. Her eyes were open but unfocused, staring at something Chelsea could not see. Something that wasn't there. Something that existed in a place where Chelsea could not follow.

"Kate." Chelsea crossed the room in three strides and knelt in front of the girl. The floor was cold through her uniform pants—the thermal tiles in the residential ring never quite warmed the way they were supposed to, a quirk of the old liner hull plating beneath them. "Kate, look at me."

Kate didn't respond. Her lips moved, shaping sounds that never arrived, her voice somewhere else entirely.

Chelsea's training kicked in. Check for physical distress. Assess responsiveness. Look for signs of seizure or medical emergency. Her fingers found Kate's wrist, checking the pulse. Steady. Her hand moved to Kate's forehead. Normal temperature. She watched the rise and fall of the small chest. Breathing was even. Deep.

She wasn't in physical danger.

She was somewhere else.

"Kate." Chelsea took the girl's face in her hands, gently tilting it until they were eye to eye. Kate's skin was cool against her palms. Her cheeks had lost the healthy flush they used to carry. "I need you to come back. Whatever you're seeing, whatever you're hearing, you need to come back to me. Now."

For a long, terrible moment, nothing happened. Kate stared through Chelsea as if she wasn't there.

Then her eyes focused. Snapped back to the present like a rubber band releasing. She gasped—a broken half-sob.

"Chelsea?" Her voice was small. Lost. The voice of someone who had been very far away.

"I'm here." Chelsea pulled her into a hug, holding tight. Kate was all sharp angles and thin bones in her arms. When had she gotten so small? Or had Chelsea just not been paying attention? "I'm right here. You're okay."

Kate trembled in her arms. Not crying. She didn't cry anymore—hadn't in months. But shaking, her teeth chattering, like something cold had gotten into her bones and wouldn't let go. Like she'd been standing in a freezer for hours.

"Where were you?" Chelsea asked when the trembling subsided. She kept her voice gentle, non-threatening. "Just now. What did you see?"

Kate pulled back. Her face had gone still. The open book of her expressions closing, page by page, into something unreadable.

"Nothing. I was just... thinking."

Two years of caring for this child, two years of watching her grow and change and carry weights no nine-year-old should carry—Chelsea could see it. The way she didn't quite meet Chelsea's eyes. The slight tension in her shoulders. The too-casual tone.

But she didn't push. Not yet.

"Okay," she said carefully. "Are you hungry? I made pasta."

Kate nodded. "I'm fine. Sorry. I just... lost track of time."

Another lie. The words came too easily. Too practiced. Like she'd been rehearsing them in her head for hours.

Chelsea helped her up and led her to the small kitchen area of their quarters. The air here was different—warm and close, carrying the rich smell of tomato and basil from the sauce she'd made from scratch. Steam curled from the pot on the heating element, fogging the small window above the counter. Kate sat at the table while Chelsea served, and they ate in a silence that felt heavier than it should. The pasta was good—Chelsea had made the sauce the way Kate liked it—but Kate ate mechanically, without pleasure.

Something was wrong. Something beyond the usual wrongness of their lives. Chelsea didn't know what it was yet.

But she intended to find out.

***

That night, Chelsea didn't sleep.

She sat in the chair by Kate's bedroom door, listening. The station's night cycle had dimmed the lights, casting long shadows across the common room. Kate had gone to bed at the usual time, said goodnight with the usual words, closed her door with the usual soft click.

But the usual didn't feel usual anymore.

Chelsea's fingers found the scar on her left forearm—the jagged ridge from wrist to elbow—and traced it through the fabric of her sleeve. An old habit. The same way her tongue would find a chipped tooth, probing the damage again and again.

Proxima Station. Three years ago. Deck Seven, residential wing.

Lily had been five. Dark curls, a gap-toothed grin, a laugh that carried through bulkheads and made strangers smile in corridors two sections away. She'd been in the children's wing for art class when the incursion alarm sounded—fingerpaints and construction paper and a teacher named Mrs. Okoro who'd once told Chelsea that Lily had real talent, that the way she mixed colors was unusual for a child her age.

Chelsea had been three decks below, running maintenance drills. She'd heard the alarm and her body had known before her brain caught up—legs moving, hands shoving past the crew members who stood frozen in the corridor, feet hammering up two emergency ladders toward Deck Seven. A blast door had been cycling shut and she'd thrown herself through the narrowing gap, her forearm catching on a jagged hull breach where an access panel had buckled. Skin split from wrist to elbow. Blood sheeted down her hand and she hadn't slowed. Hadn't registered the pain until hours later, when a medic stitched the wound shut while Chelsea stared at the wall and said nothing.

By the time she'd reached the residential section, that particular silence had already settled. The silence that meant people had been there and weren't anymore.

The Hollowing's energy had swept through like a tide. Quick. Surgical. Forty-seven people in the residential section at the moment of breach. No survivors. No bodies to recover, either—just empty clothes and cooling coffee cups and the fading heat signatures of lives snuffed between one breath and the next. The structural damage was minimal. A few cracked viewports. Some overloaded circuitry.

The human damage was total.

Chelsea had found Lily's shoes under the art table. Small pink sneakers with Velcro straps—Lily had been so proud that she could fasten them herself, had demonstrated the skill to Chelsea every single morning for two weeks straight, tongue poking out in concentration, small fingers pressing the straps down with ceremonial precision. The shoes sat neatly side by side, still warm, as if their owner had simply stepped out of them and walked barefoot into somewhere else. Beside them, a half-finished finger painting of a purple cat with enormous green eyes and whiskers that ran off the edge of the paper.

Chelsea had picked up the shoes and refused to put them down.

The medical team had pried her fingers loose one by one—index, middle, ring, pinky—while she knelt on the floor of the children's wing and made no sound at all. That wasn't in any official report. Neither was the fact that she'd gone back the next day, and the day after, and sat in the empty art room until station security changed the access codes.

The grief counselors had used words like "processing" and "stages" and "healthy timeline for recovery." Chelsea had smiled at the right moments, completed the required sessions, and returned to active duty eight weeks later with a clean psychological evaluation and a hole in her chest that no amount of processing could fill.

When they'd offered her the Kate assignment—a newly orphaned child with an impossible connection to the very force that had taken Lily—she'd stared at the file photograph for eleven minutes without speaking. Dark hair. Scared eyes. A chin set with stubborn bravery that looked nothing like Lily and everything like her at the same time.

She'd said yes because the alternative was letting another child face it alone. And because some part of her—the part that still carried the ghost weight of pink shoes in her hands—needed to prove she could keep this one safe. Could be fast enough. Close enough. Present when it mattered, instead of three decks away running the wrong direction.

Now she sat in the dark outside another child's door, and the fear was the same fear. The same helpless certainty that something was reaching for the person she'd sworn to protect.

She would not be three decks away again.

Midnight passed. Then one AM. Then two. Chelsea's back ached from the uncomfortable chair. Her eyes burned from staring at nothing. Somewhere, a version of her was laughing at this—the decorated officer, the woman who'd led containment squads through active incursion zones, reduced to pulling a one-woman sentry shift outside a nine-year-old's bedroom door. But something kept her rooted to this spot. The same instinct that had kept her alive through three deployments: when something felt wrong, you didn't sleep. You watched.

At 2:34, Kate started talking in her sleep.

Chelsea was on her feet immediately, ear pressed to the door. The words were muffled, indistinct. She couldn't make them out through the barrier. But she could hear enough to know they weren't normal sleep-sounds. Not mumbled complaints or random syllables.

They were structured. Intentional.

Wrong.

She opened the door.

Kate lay in bed, blanket tangled around her legs, face turned toward the ceiling. Her mouth moved continuously, shaping sounds that Chelsea had never heard before. Not English. Not any human language Chelsea recognized. Not Japanese or Mandarin or Arabic or any of the dozens of tongues Chelsea had learned to identify.

They weren't words at all.

The sounds were wrong. They slid against each other in ways that human vocal cords shouldn't have produced. Syllables that overlapped, that existed in the same moment twice, that carried undertones and overtones that made Chelsea's stomach clench with instinctive wrongness. It was like listening to two people speak at once, except it was coming from one small throat.

Kate's eyes were open. Staring at nothing. Seeing something.

Chelsea approached the bed slowly. Her heart hammered in her chest. "Kate. Kate, wake up."

The sounds continued. Kate's lips formed shapes that looked painful, stretched and twisted in ways that didn't match normal speech. Her jaw moved at angles that were wrong—slightly too wide, slightly inhuman.

"Kate." Chelsea shook her shoulder. "Wake up. Now."

Kate's mouth snapped shut. Her eyes blinked. Focused.

"Chelsea?" She sounded confused. Disoriented. Like someone waking from a deep dream. "What time is it?"

"Almost three in the morning." Chelsea sat on the edge of the bed, her stomach clenching. "You were talking in your sleep."

"Oh." Kate sat up, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. "Sorry. Did I wake you?"

"What were you saying?"

Kate went still. "What do you mean?"

"You were talking. For almost ten minutes. Words I've never heard before." Chelsea kept her voice steady through sheer force of will. "Words that didn't sound like words at all."

Kate's face closed off. That same shuttered look, chin dropping, eyes going flat.

"I don't remember," she said. "I was probably just dreaming."

"Kate."

"I don't remember, Chelsea. Sometimes people talk in their sleep. It doesn't mean anything."

Chelsea wanted to push. Wanted to demand answers, to break through the walls Kate had built around herself over these past months. But she'd learned that pushing made Kate retreat further. Made her close off completely.

"Okay," Chelsea said instead. "Try to get some more sleep."

Kate nodded. Lay back down. Closed her eyes.

Chelsea didn't leave. She sat there, watching, waiting. After twenty minutes, Kate's breathing evened out. She looked peaceful. Normal.

But Chelsea knew better now.

***

Morning came with the artificial brightness of station lights cycling to day mode. Chelsea made breakfast—eggs and toast, Kate's favorite—and pretended that everything was fine. The eggs sizzled in the pan, their synthetic smell close enough to real to fool the nose if you didn't think about it. The toast popped up golden brown. Normal sounds. Normal morning.

Kate appeared in the kitchen at the usual time. Dressed in the usual clothes. Hair braided in the usual way.

But there were shadows under her eyes that hadn't been there a week ago. A pallor to her skin that makeup couldn't hide. Small changes. The kind that most people wouldn't notice.

Chelsea's chest tightened. She'd cataloged changes like these before—in the weeks before Proxima Station, when the incursion frequency had spiked and everyone on the station had grown a little paler, a little thinner, a little more hollow around the eyes. She hadn't recognized the pattern then. She recognized it now.

"You have a session with Nigel this morning," Chelsea said, setting a plate in front of Kate. "Neural scans and dimensional sensitivity testing."

"I know." Kate picked at her food. "He'll say my readings are stronger than ever. He'll look worried. He'll tell you to watch me closely."

"He already tells me that."

"Then nothing will change." Kate took a bite of toast. Chewed mechanically. "Can I ask you something, Chelsea?"

"Of course."

"The original portal closers. The ones from two hundred years ago." Kate's voice was carefully casual—too casual. "Did they ever have bad dreams?"

Chelsea's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. "What kind of dreams?"

"Just... dreams. Weird ones. About the Hollowing. About being somewhere else. Somewhere..." Kate trailed off. Shook her head. "Never mind. It's stupid."

"It's not stupid." Chelsea set down her fork. "Kate, if you're having unusual dreams, you need to tell me. Tell Nigel. That's exactly the kind of thing we need to monitor."

Kate looked up at her. Her eyes—those too-old eyes—held something Chelsea couldn't quite read.

"They'll just add it to my file," Kate said. "Another data point. Another reason to study me. Another way I'm not normal."

"Kate—"

"I'm fine, Chelsea. Really. Just tired." Kate pushed back from the table. "I should get ready for my session."

She left before Chelsea could respond. The half-eaten breakfast sat on the table, evidence of a conversation that had gone nowhere.

Chelsea stared at it for a long moment. Then she pulled out her tablet and started writing.

***

The message to Lucas was short. Direct.

"Something's wrong with Kate. I don't know what, but it's getting worse. She's hiding things. Lying to me. Having episodes that she won't talk about. I need help."

Lucas's response came twenty minutes later.

"Meet me in Research Lab Seven. Bring what you've observed. Don't tell Kate."

Chelsea read the message twice. The last line settled like a stone in her stomach. Don't tell Kate.

She'd spent two years earning this child's trust. Two years being the one person Kate could count on to be honest with her. Two years proving that not all adults lie, that not everyone wants to use her, that some people genuinely care about her wellbeing.

And now she was going to have a secret meeting about Kate behind Kate's back.

It was betrayal.

But something was wrong. And Chelsea was more afraid of not knowing than she was of damaging trust.

***

Research Lab Seven was in the secure wing of Station Unity—the section built from what had once been a military frigate's engine room, where the bulkheads were three inches thick and the air still carried a faint vibration from conduit channels that had once fed plasma to gun batteries. Access required three forms of authentication and a DNA scan. The door was heavy, reinforced, designed to contain whatever happened inside.

Lucas was waiting when Chelsea arrived. So was Nigel Rhodes. And Commander Voss.

"This is bigger than I expected," Chelsea said.

"Sit down." Voss gestured to an empty chair. Her face was unreadable, her posture military-straight. "Tell us everything."

Chelsea told them. The episode in Kate's room—how she had found her staring at nothing, unreachable. The strange sounds in her sleep—those wrong syllables that shouldn't have come from human vocal cords. The way Kate had pulled back over the past weeks, building walls where there used to be openness. The lies that came too easily. The silences that stretched too long.

When she'd finished, no one spoke for a moment. Nigel stared at his tablet. Lucas's face was pale. Voss looked like someone had confirmed her worst fears.

"Show her," Voss said finally. "Show her the readings."

Nigel hesitated, then swiped his tablet to display on the room's main screen. Numbers and graphs appeared. Brain scans. Energy signatures. Data that Chelsea didn't fully understand but knew was important.

"These are Kate's neural patterns from six months ago," Nigel said, pointing to the left side of the display. "Normal. Well, normal for her—elevated dimensional sensitivity, but stable. Controlled. These are the patterns we've been monitoring for two years."

He swiped to the right side. "These are her readings from this morning."

The difference was stark. Even Chelsea could see it. The patterns were wilder. More erratic. There were spikes in areas that had been previously dormant. Colors in the scan that hadn't been there before—harsh reds and purples where soft blues and greens used to be.

"What does this mean?" Chelsea asked, though part of her already knew.

"It means her connection to the Hollowing is strengthening." Nigel's voice was quiet. "Not gradually, the way it had been. Exponentially. Whatever barrier existed between Kate and the dimensional corruption—it was breaking down."

Chelsea's arms prickled with gooseflesh. "Breaking down how? What happens when it breaks completely?"

No one answered.

"What happens?" she demanded.

"We don't know," Lucas said finally. His damaged hand trembled against his thigh. "The original subjects—the ones who helped close the portals two hundred years ago—we don't have detailed records of what happened to them at the end. Just that they..." He trailed off.

"They became part of the barrier," Nigel finished. "Their consciousness, their life force—it merged with the seal. They stopped being human and became... something else."

Chelsea stared at him. The words didn't quite register. "You're telling me that Kate is going to become part of the barrier?"

"We're telling you that her readings match the historical patterns," Voss said. Her voice was clinical. Controlled. "Whatever process they went through, Kate is showing the same markers."

"Then we stop it." Chelsea stood. Her hands were shaking. She didn't care. "We sever her connection. We find a way to—"

"We don't know how." Lucas cut her off gently. "We've been trying to understand the dimensional link for two years. We still don't know what it is, how it works, or how to break it without killing her."

"So what? We just watch? We let her become... whatever they became?" Chelsea's voice cracked, and beneath the anger something older surged up—Lily's shoes under the art table, the silence of Deck Seven, the medical team's fingers on hers. "She's a child, not a weapon. We've been using her for two years to detect incursions—does anyone in this room think that's ethical?"

The silence that followed was damning. Lucas's damaged hand trembled against his thigh. Nigel stared at his tablet as if the numbers there could absolve him.

It was Voss who finally spoke. "The ethics review board flagged this program eighteen months ago. They recommended finding alternative detection methods and limiting Kate's exposure."

"What happened?"

"Three hundred people died in the Sector Seven incursion because we didn't have early warning." Voss's voice was flat. "The board withdrew their objection. We all did." She looked at Chelsea, her gaze dropping for the first time. "We told ourselves it was temporary. That we were buying time to find another way. That using her was better than letting hundreds die. But she's nine years old, and we've been exploiting her ability while her mind slowly breaks."

"We monitor. We study. We try to find solutions before—" Voss stopped herself. Took a breath. Chelsea thought of Marcus, dying by inches in the secure wing, consumed by Hollowing exposure that had touched him three years ago. He knew what this corruption did to a person. "Before it's too late."

Chelsea looked around the room. At these people who had treated Kate like an asset. Who had used her to save lives while her own life slipped away. Who had monitored and measured and studied while a nine-year-old girl carried the weight of humanity's survival on her small shoulders.

"She's nine years old," Chelsea said. Her voice dropped low, raw. "She's a little girl who likes puzzles and talks to plants in the garden and still sleeps with a nightlight because the dark scares her. And you're telling me that she's going to disappear into some dimensional barrier because you don't know how to save her?"

No one had an answer.

Chelsea sat back down. The anger was still there—banked, not gone. "What do I do?"

"Be there for her," Lucas said. "Be the person she trusts. If she opens up—about the dreams, about what she's experiencing—we need to know. It might give us the information we need to help her."

"So you want me to spy on her."

"I want you to save her life. Any way you can."

Chelsea closed her eyes. Kate. Small, tired, carrying weights no child should carry. Lying to protect people from worry. Hiding what was happening to her because she thought no one could help.

The ghost weight of pink shoes pressed against Chelsea's palms.

She'd failed Lily by being too far away. She would not fail Kate by being too careful.

"I'll do what I can," Chelsea said finally. "But I won't lie to her. Not anymore than I already have."

"That's all we can ask." Voss stood. "Report anything unusual. Any change in behavior. Any sign that the process is accelerating."

The meeting ended. Chelsea walked back to her quarters, turning the information over the way she sorted threat assessments—by severity, by timeline, by what she could control.

Kate was there, returned from her session with Nigel. She was doing a puzzle on the table—the sunset over Earth that she had shown to Alexis yesterday. The pieces clicked together under her careful fingers.

"Hey," Kate said without looking up. "How was your morning?"

Chelsea looked at her. This child she had sworn to protect. This child who was slipping away.

"Fine," Chelsea said. "Just meetings. Boring stuff."

Kate nodded. Her fingers found a piece that fit perfectly into the corner of the sky.

Chelsea sat down across from her and started looking for matching edges.

Some lies were necessary. Some secrets were kindnesses.

She hated them all.

***

Chelsea found Lucas in the corridor outside his quarters that evening, heading toward the analysis wing. She caught his arm.

"I need to show you something." She kept her voice low. "Not here."

In her quarters, Chelsea pulled up the recordings on her tablet. She'd started capturing Kate's sleep episodes a month ago, nights when Kate's lips shaped sounds that made Chelsea's skin crawl.

"Listen."

The audio quality was poor—a tablet microphone in a dark room—but the sounds were unmistakable. Kate's voice, but not Kate's language. Syllables that overlapped and doubled back on themselves, consonants that slid into frequencies no human throat should produce. The sounds crawled from the small speaker like something surfacing from deep water.

Lucas's face went gray. His damaged hand seized against his thigh, tremor worsening, and he pressed it flat to hide the shaking.

"You know it," Chelsea said.

"My grandmother showed me recordings." His voice came out scraped raw. "Two hundred years old. The same sounds. The language of the Dominion—the ones who served the Hollowing as intermediaries." He stopped the playback. His hand trembled so badly he nearly dropped the tablet. "Kate doesn't speak any foreign languages."

"No."

"Then it's speaking through her."

The words landed in the small room like a stone dropped into still water. Chelsea sank onto the edge of the bed, hands clasped between her knees.

"What does that mean, Lucas?"

"It means the connection isn't just receiving anymore. It's becoming two-way." He set the tablet down with exaggerated care, as if it might shatter. "My grandmother's stories—the early subjects showed this progression. Dreams first. Then language. Then..."

"Then what?"

He didn't answer. He didn't need to. The silence said everything.

"I need to talk to Kate," Lucas said. "Alone."

***

He found her in the observation garden—the small greenhouse attached to the medical wing, humid and warm, thick with the smell of growing things. Automated misters hissed at regular intervals, coating broad leaves with fine droplets that caught the artificial light. Kate sat on a bench beneath the artificial sun lamp, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped tight around her shins, making herself as small as possible.

"May I sit?"

She shifted without answering—automatic politeness, the reflex of a child trained to accommodate adults even when she wanted to be alone.

Lucas lowered himself onto the bench, biting back a grunt as his joints protested. He leaned his cane against the armrest and let the silence hold for a moment. The grow lights buzzed. The irrigation systems clicked. The air smelled green and damp and nothing like the repurposed corridors outside.

"Chelsea is worried about you," he said.

"Chelsea is always worried. That is her job."

"Is that all it is?"

Kate was quiet. Around them, the garden hummed with artificial life.

"She cares about me," Kate said finally. "I know that. But caring about someone does not mean you can help them."

"No. Sometimes it just means you have to watch them suffer."

Kate turned to look at him. Her dark eyes were old, so much older than nine years should allow. "You know something. About what is happening to me."

"I know some things."

"Tell me."

Steel in that young voice—the kind that came from facing the unthinkable and refusing to look away.

"The Hollowing does not create connections at random," he said carefully. "It chooses. It seeks out specific people for specific reasons. The ones it touches... they become doorways."

"Doorways to what?"

"To here. To our world." Lucas looked down at his trembling hand. "Two hundred years ago, it tried to use people like you to breach our reality. To come through."

"What happened to them? Those people?"

Lucas did not answer. Could not.

Kate nodded slowly, as if she had expected his silence. "Chelsea talks in her sleep sometimes, too. Did you know that? She does not say strange words like I do. She says my name. Over and over." The girl's voice dropped to a whisper. "She is afraid of losing me."

"Are you afraid of being lost?"

Kate uncurled slowly, lowering her feet to the floor. She looked at her hands—small, pale, trembling.

"I hear it now," she said quietly. "When I am awake. Just whispers. Just feelings. Like someone standing behind me that I cannot quite see."

Lucas's chest tightened. "How long?"

"A few weeks. Maybe longer." Kate looked up at him. "It wants me to answer. Every day, it wants me to answer a little more."

"What do you say?"

"Nothing." The girl's hands curled into fists. "I do not say anything. But staying quiet is getting harder."

"Kate." He reached out, put his trembling hand on her shoulder. Her small frame was fragile beneath his fingers. "You need to tell us when it gets too hard. You cannot carry this alone."

"Can you stop it?"

The question was simple. Direct. A child's question, without cushioning.

"I do not know," Lucas admitted. "But we can try."

Kate studied his face. Then she nodded once, a sharp jerk of her chin.

"There is something else. Something I have not told Chelsea. Something I have not told anyone."

Lucas waited.

"The whispers." Kate's dark eyes held his. "They are not random. They are not just noise. They are saying something."

"What are they saying?"

"My name." The girl's voice cracked. "It keeps saying my name. Over and over. Like it is trying to learn how to speak it."

The grow lights hummed. The irrigation systems clicked. The artificial sun cast warm light across the garden, pretending everything was normal.

Lucas's tablet buzzed. A message from Alexis: *Found something in the prediction data. Meet me in Analysis Bay 3. Come alone.*

He stood carefully. "I will talk to Alexis. We will figure this out."

"Will you?" Kate's smile was thin and tired and did not reach her eyes. "The people from two hundred years ago—the doorways—did they figure it out too?"

Lucas had no answer for that.

He did not think she expected one.

***

That night, Chelsea didn't sleep again. She sat by Kate's door, listening. Waiting.

At 2:17 AM, the sounds began.

Not words. Not anything human. The same syllables she'd played for Lucas—those wrong, doubled sounds that shouldn't come from a child's throat. But louder now. More fluent. As if whatever was using Kate's voice was becoming more comfortable with the instrument.

Chelsea closed her eyes and prayed to whatever gods might still be listening that they would find a way to save this child.

The sounds continued.

Kate didn't wake.